"A fresh and innovative take on the traditional family saga. the new Barnhardt goes down smooth and delivers with a kick." -Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband Duke are at the center of Charlotte, North Carolina's burgeoning society, where old southern money and the secrets behind it meet the new wealth of bankers, real estate speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers.  Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family's legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy whose promising political career ended mysteriously, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War expert and re-enactor. Jerene's brother Gaston is an infamously-dissolute bestselling historical novelist who has never managed to begin his long-dreamed-of masterpiece titled Lookaway, Dixieland, and her sister Dillard suffers from a nervous ailment that has rendered her a near-recluse. As the four Johnston children-smart but reckless Annie, good-boy minister Bo, might be gay but that's okay Josh, and damaged, dangerous Jerilyn-flounder in their adult lives, Jerene must take action to preserve her legacy and Duke's fragile honor. And she will stop at nothing to keep what she has, while holding her own terrible past at bay.  In Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt has written a full-bore, headlong, hilarious narrative of a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and an unforgettable woman striving to pull it all together.